that would only work for named urls that don't have any captures, since you can't pass *args or **kwargs to redirect;

that would allow passing a model instance as success_url, and I don't think that makes sense here;

redirect is not very well defined, it does more magic than necessary here, see the source: <quote> # If this doesn't "feel" like a URL, re-raise. </quote>. Ugh.

I think django.shortcuts in general, and redirect in particular, are little hacks to ease developers' lives, and not something that should be used in Django itself. Currently, django.shortcuts is only used in contrib apps, never in the core; and the only functions used are get_object_or_404 and render_to_response. Both of these are more straightforward than redirect; they don't do any magic.

I think success_url = urlresolvers.reverse(my_url_name) is explicit and works in your situation.

However, since I'm not 100% sure that we don't want this feature, I'll mark the ticket as DDN and let a core developer make the decision. If it's accepted, the patch still needs tests and documentations.